Archive for the ‘language’ Category
Interview with Umberto Eco
November 16th, 2009
Der Spiegel has an interesting interview with scholar and author Umberto Eco, in which he discusses the merits of lists:
SPIEGEL: But why does Homer list all of those warriors and their ships if he knows that he can never name them all?
Eco: Homer’s work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that. We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are in the same position. They experience a deficiency of language, a lack of words to express their feelings. But do lovers ever stop trying to do so? They create lists: Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone … One could go into great detail.
Another good one:
Eco: … Culture isn’t knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes.
Also, hearing the author of Foucault’s Pendulum say, “I felt like a character in a Dan Brown novel,” is a little bizarre.
The Sokal Affair
August 18th, 2009
The Sokal Affair was an incident in which a physicist, Alan Sokal, wrote a parody article using deconstructionist terminology and managed to have it published in a reputable journal of cultural studies. There was a big fuss. He discusses his reasons for doing such a thing here; an excerpt:
“But why did I do it? I confess that I’m an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I’m a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them. (If science were merely a negotiation of social conventions about what is agreed to be “true”, why would I bother devoting a large fraction of my all-too-short life to it? I don’t aspire to be the Emily Post of quantum field theory.”
The ongoing struggle between the two cultures is awesome and hilarious but mostly just sad.
Translation Party
August 13th, 2009
Translation Party translates a phrase between English and Japanese until it stops changing. By the end it’s often something pretty different.
Protip: Try Monty Python quotes.
The Chomskybot
August 9th, 2009
The Chomskybot generates random text in the style of linguist Noam Chomsky. Here’s a sample:
Note that the speaker-hearer’s linguistic intuition is unspecified with respect to the strong generative capacity of the theory. Analogously, the notion of level of grammaticalness suffices to account for the requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol. Let us continue to suppose that relational information raises serious doubts about the system of base rules exclusive of the lexicon. Summarizing, then, we assume that an important property of these three types of EC is not to be considered in determining irrelevant intervening contexts in selectional rules. It must be emphasized, once again, that this analysis of a formative as a pair of sets of features is to be regarded as a parasitic gap construction.
It’s got a wikipedia entry.
Oxt Weekend
August 2nd, 2009
The new way to say, “Not this weekend but the weekend after.”
Oxt Weekend is an experiment in engineering language by removing the ambiguous phrase “next weekend” and replacing it with “oxt weekend.”
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.com
July 26th, 2009
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s masterwork, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, is simultaneously the most clearly written and most incredibly dense piece of writing I’ve ever encountered outside of a Springer textbook. The book consists of Wittgenstein basically showing that most philosophical problems can be reduced to issues of linguistic analysis.
The Tractatus is incredibly structured – it’s almost like a big outline, complete with sub-sub-sub-topics – and as a result readily lends itself to online reading! So, if you’re as huge a nerd as I am, you might enjoy the hypertext version of the Tractatus.
Quines
July 21st, 2009
Named after the American philosopher and logician W.V.O. Quine, a quine is a program whose only output is its own code. Here’s a neat example in Lisp/Scheme, taken from the wikipedia article:
((lambda (x) (list x (list 'quote x)))
'(lambda (x) (list x (list 'quote x))))
computer science, language, math, old dead white guys | No Comments »
MIT GEB Lectures
June 4th, 2009
For the last few years, MIT has been putting the course materials for many (about 1,900) of its classes online for free as part of its OpenCourseWare project. Most of them are really fantastic, and the site is worth browsing through. Of particular interest to me is the series of lectures for a course devoted to Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. Which, if you haven’t read, you should; these lectures might help you along if you’ve found it a bit difficult.
Incidentally, the course is taught by an undergrad math major! The guy’s teaching style is a little rough, but he’s actually laudably competent.
books, computer science, language, math, science, video, web | No Comments »
Wolfram Alpha’s Launching Tonight
May 15th, 2009
At 8 PM Eastern time, Wolfram Alpha is going live. If you haven’t yet seen the screencast, you should, because it looks terrific. I doubt it will be more than a few weeks until Google comes up with an equally incredible product, but still, pretty neat.
See above for a totally authentic screenshot of the new software. IT KNOWS EVERYTHING
computer science, language, math, science, video | No Comments »